by Jon Lackman | 11 July 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
The 400th-anniversary Amsterdam exhibition Rembrandt – Quest of a Genius addresses serious scholarly questions, writes Manfred Schwarz in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. How to explain the Night Watch, so different from the meditative, sentimental pictures of its era? (Peter Greenaway’s film Nightwatching appropriately compares it to corrupt, greasy 1920s-Chicago, though the analogy only goes so far.) The exhibition frames it within a crisis of artistic ambition. Werner Busch in the Tagesspiegel considers the fortunes of the Rembrandt Research Project led by Ernst van de Wetering, which assigns attributions to pictures based on examination by a team of experts. Although wondrous in their detail, the projects have produced dizzying shifts from category C (definitely not Rembrandt) to category A (definitely by Rembrandt). Meanwhile, as Gary Schwartz points out, category B (indefinite attribution) grows at a terrifying pace.
